Apple & FreeBSD relationship

[mikel king]

On Mar 10, 2011, at 6:00 AM, Nerius Landys wrote:

> This is not a technical question.
> 
> Basically I have some cash sitting around.  I'm thinking of investing
> part of it with a company that I believe in.  Apple came to mind.  You
> could say that I'd like to judge Apple's moral character before
> investing money with them.  Does anyone know how Apple reciprocates to
> FreeBSD?  After all a lot of MacOSX is borrowed from FreeBSD.  I am
> not seeing Apple's name on this page:
> http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml .  Are there
> other ways in which Apple might be reciprocating?
> 
> - Nerius

Apple has had a mixed relationship giving back to the BSD community. They did hire several developers over time and do have several projects that they have open sourced. Launchd & iCal server are two of the bigger ones. I personally feel that they could do better and certainly could have done things differently in a way that would have helped the community and built an even stronger product base but let's face it they sure aren't listening to me.

In recent years their marketing as gone to some lengths to scrub the references to BSD & UNIX from the brochures. It's like they are ashamed of their roots, again personally I think they hired some new anti-geeks that just don't get it.

I would suggest you look at spreading your investment around to several BSD supportive companies.  Obviously Apple and Juniper pop up to the top of the list. I would have offered Isilon but they have been assimilated into the beast know as EMC so that may not be an option.

At the end of the day they are a company, and companies must make money in order to survive. Therefore, do not get too attached to their BSD rhetoric because the winds of business can change direction at any moment.

On a side note: I would love to find a comprehensive list of both public and private companies that are BSD supportive.

Regards,
Mikel King
BSD News Network
http://bsdnews.net
skype: mikel.king
http://twitter.com/mikelking